The Manhattan Project Part One

In this episode, Ben Bowlin joins the show to talk about the scientific and political landscape that made the Manhattan Project possible. What was Einstein's role? Who first discovered nuclear fission?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Technology, What tex Stop from host Coom. Hey there, and
welcome to Text Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I'm joining me
in the studio is my good friend and colleague Den
Boland's Den, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks for
having me. Fact. You know, I have to say I

(00:27):
worked on an opening joke for this but at uh
but at this point I thought, you know, I don't
want to disparage the gravity of what we're doing anything
less than a few tangents or puns in this story,
because this is a fascinating story. It's a fascinating story,
and and you can't get around the fact that the

(00:48):
end of the story is massively tragic, right Like, like
there's there's a ton of things that we can talk about,
and what we are talking about is the Manhattan Project.
And I'm gonna go ahead and let you guys know,
this sucker is going to be a two parter because
in order to cover the Manhattan Project, you have to
have an understanding of what was going on in physics
leading up to the beginning of the project, which will

(01:11):
be this episode, and then there's another episode that will
be all about the actual developments of the project itself.
And this is complicated for multiple reasons. One, nuclear physics
not straightforward as it turns out. Yeah, actually lots of
pressure because of the implosion technique. But we'll get into
that in episode two. Also politics, a lot of politics.

(01:33):
I mean, obviously, the Manhattan Project was formed as a
result of World War Two. If World War Two had
not been happening, the Manhattan Project probably would not have
been formed, and nuclear power may have either been pushed
back by quite a bit or someone else would have
ended up developing it ahead of the United States. So, uh,

(01:55):
both of those things. Science and politics by themselves are complex.
And when you come buying the two and you try
to make science work within the realm of a political structure,
it gets messy. Yeah, and not not in like a
cool I got my hair cut at a nice salon.
Look at me. Messy, not like rolled out of bed. Oh,

(02:15):
this didn't hike me any time at all. Right, messy
as in, uh, is a massive loss of blood and treasure.
I think we're looking at the equivalent of when it
got rolling thirty billion dollars you you know, yeah, today's money.
It all depends upon the well, it really depends upon
how you define the scope of the project, because that's

(02:38):
something else that's kind of confusing because you hear Manhattan
Project and you think, okay, uh, Manhattan Project, that's the
one that took place in oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington,
Los Alamos, New Mexico. Makes sense. We will explain all
of that as we go through. So in case you
weren't aware of, the Manhattan Project was the code named

(02:58):
the United States government gave to the the effort to
design and build an atomic bomb for use in World
War two. And in order for us to talk about
we have to go back way before World War two.
In fact, we have to go back before World War One. Yes, yeah,
we have to go all the way back to the

(03:19):
I guess the end of the nineteenth century, that is correct,
late nineteenth century. Uh. There was a fella by the
name of Henrie beccarell alright who had made an interesting
observation observing that some material, when placed against some plates,
would create a negative image. And he had assumed that

(03:42):
this material was phosphorescent, that it absorbed sunlight and then
given off some form of ray to create this image,
but later determined that he was mistaken that there was
no need for the sunlight. The stuff was giving off
the ray is by itself. And then you had the

(04:03):
Curies coming along who who went on to study this themselves.
Marie Cury coined the term radioactive radioactive with the word
ray in it. And so at this point there was
an understanding that certain elements had a type of energy
they could give off spontaneously, spontaneous radiation. And that is

(04:29):
the beginning, the nub that the kernel that forms the
the very center of the Manhattan Project's purpose. So building
on that we then have there's a guy in Nive.
He had a little theory. It was a special theory,
I mean relatively special man. Yes, yes, And that that

(04:51):
man you may know today through countless Internet memes Albert Einstein. Yes, yes,
Albert Einstein al to friends, was a brilliant physicist, obviously,
and it was all the way back in when Einstein
proposed the special theory of relativity, which, among many other things,

(05:12):
positive that energy and matter are pretty much interchangeable. And
this is where the the famous equation E equals MC
squared comes from. The E means energy, the M means mass,
The C squared C stands for the constant of the
speed of light through a vacuum. Keeping in mind that

(05:34):
light actually can travel at different speeds depending upon the
medium through which it travels. Travels more slowly through water
than through a vacuum, for example. So you take that
constant of lights the speed of light in a vacuum,
and you square it, so a number that's already huge
gets huger. That huge number, by the way, in case

(05:55):
you're wondering, is two seven, four hundred fifty eight meters
per second. Squaring that, you get eight point nine nine
times ten to the sixteen power. It's a big number.
So what that tells you if you look at that equation,
what that tells you is that a very tiny amount
of mass is equivalent to an enormous amount of energy,

(06:18):
and vice versa. An enormous amount of energy is equivalent
to a teeny tiny little bit of mass. So if
you were to have a physical process in which you
start with an atom and you split that atom, and
the two components of that split atom collectively have less

(06:38):
mass than the original atom, you can't destroy or create
energy or mass, but you can convert one to the other.
That mask gets converted into energy, essentially kinetic energy, which
gets converted into heat and then you get a whole
bunch of heat from it. Yeah, that's what Einstein had said.
He says, this is this is the way the universe works.

(06:58):
Energy and mass ultimately the same thing. And then there
were if I recall, there were three broad historical reactions.
Some people said nah, some people said maybe, and a
lot of people went oh, yeah, exactly, yeah, and and
so this really uh, you know, we're gonna be telling
about a lot about two different types of scientists. Theoretical

(07:22):
scientists not they're not theoretical they work in the realm
of theory, and experimental scientists who take theory, apply experiments
to test those theories and then find out if the
results either bear the theorial or it needs to be
tweaked or whatever. Right, So, uh. In nineteen eleven we

(07:43):
get another important development by a discovery by a fellow
named Ernest Rutherford. Now, Rutherford proposes a model of the
atom in which you have a nucleus of positive particles
which are dubbed protons, and they're orbited by negatively charged
particles dubbed electrons. That's the Rutherford model of the atom.

(08:05):
And it's the simplest version question yes, just just for
you and the audience. I'm sure a lot of people
have wondered this when they were learning this. Why don't
you go with no trons, no tron's I mean that
sounds so much cooler because he was pro it's a
positive thing. Well, you know, like protons, electrons, protons, no trons. Oh,
I got you. But being being negative, those would be

(08:26):
the no trons because electrons are the agent through which
electricity is. You know, it's a matter of priority, and
that transcends a matter of marketing. But I'm saying, well,
we could even go back to the fact that Benjamin
Franklin was convinced that current means that that's the movement
of positively charged particles from one point to the other,
which is why current flows in the opposite direction of
actual electricity, which, by the way, it drives me crazy.

(08:49):
You know you've talked about it before, and which, by
the way, I think we could cut to the end
of the show because this means clearly that nuclear weapons
are should be the blame for those should be eight
at the at the field of Benjamin Franklin, like so
many things, the bad guy. But anyway, yeah, so Ernest Rutherford.
So he discovers this, He creates this model, and then

(09:10):
Neil's Bore, another important physicist, He refines that model. He
starts to concentrate on the quantum behavior of electrons, and
that's where we get the Bore model of Adams. And
then I'm going to skip ahead to nineteen nineteen, and
that's when Rutherford transmutes nitrogen into oxygen. This is something

(09:30):
that alchemists had been attempting to do for centuries, although
their form of transportation was more about lead into gold sure, sure,
or the philosopher's stone or whatever. But this is an
actual transmutation. This is a point where Rutherford uh crosses.
I don't want to say it as though he's like
doing something bad, but where he where he goes from

(09:50):
just a theory to the application the way we're talking
about demonstrating it in the real world, and uh this
triggers even more changes in our right. So, the way
he does this is he takes some nitrogen atoms and
he bombards them with something called alpha particles, and alpha
particles essentially, although he didn't know this yet, an alpha

(10:14):
particle is essentially two protons and two neutrons, also known
as a heli helium nucleus. So if you use a
helium nucleus, if you strip away the electrons, what you're
left with is essentially an alpha particle, and he but
bards these nitrogen adoms with that. That's what converts it
over into oxygen. So then we skip ahead by a

(10:38):
couple of decades, are well, a little more than a
decade to ninety two. Yes, this is when James Chadwick,
who was one of Rutherford's colleagues, discovers the nucleus of
an adom can, by the way, big year in physics. Yeah,
so he discovers that the nucleus of an adom can
also contain particles that have no charge at all, hanging out.

(11:01):
They're just they're they're they're kind of like that roommate
I used to have, who you know. I felt like,
come on, dude, just just pay your part of the
utilities already, come on. I'm sorry. I wasn't gonna be so. Yeah,
these are these are neutral. That's that's the neutrons. And
by this time there was an understanding now that the

(11:22):
atoms typically consisted of protons and neutrons and the nucleus
and orbited by a number of electrons that were equal
to the number of protons, and that's what balances out
the charge. There's a but oh, let's infomercial it. But wait,
there's more. There is more. Two things that you can
you can talk about, one which is really important in

(11:42):
nuclear physics, and one which is not going to really
play a part. One is that being that if you
have an atom that has an excess or of electrons
or too few electrons, it's an UH. It's an ion
of that particular atom. But you can also have a
different number of neutrons from the protons. You can have
a variety of them, and we call these different varieties

(12:06):
of these various atoms isotopes. So an isotope of an
atom is UH is a version of that atom that
has a specific number of neutrons. So that's important to
remember now. At the time when Chadwick made this discovery,
hydrogen was the the the lightest, the least massive of

(12:27):
all the elements at one, and the heaviest or the
one with the most mass was uranium at ninety two.
That number refers to the number of protons in the atom,
not the number of neutrons. So chemists had discovered that
the atoms of the of the same elements sometimes had
different weights. This is what led to the discovery of isotopes.
So they'd say, oh, well, here's a uranium atom, but

(12:50):
we've got this other uranium atom, and they they're chemically identical.
They're exactly the same chemically, but this other one's a
little heavier than this One's what gives what that doesn't
make sense, and that's where they discovered isotopes. So uranium
has three isotopes. All of them have ninety two protons
and ninety two electrons, because if they didn't, it wouldn't

(13:11):
be uranium. But it does have a different number of neutrons.
So you've got uranium two three eight. That's the most
common form of uranium found in nature. It has a
hundred forty six neutrons in the nucleus and it's nine
It makes up all natural uranium. So when you when
you go uranium hunting, odds are you going to find

(13:31):
you two thirty eight. Then you have uranium two thirty five,
which has a hundred forty three neutrons, and uranium two
thirty four, which has a hundred forty two neutrons, and
you two thirty five will become incredibly important in its discussion,
and you two thirty four is one of the decay products, right, yeah. Yeah.

(13:52):
So also in nineteen thirty two going on at the
same time, you had physicists J. D. Crow Croft and E. T. S.
Walton split a lithium atom into two helium nuclei. Uh,
the the protons and neutrons I was talking about by
bombarding the lithium with protons using a particle accelerator. And

(14:13):
this is the first example of someone splitting the atom
the very first time. Yeah, it is. In my opinion,
this is up there with the first human footfall on
the move. Yeah. This fundamentally changes everything, and it's strange
that we don't hear more people talk about it. Yeah,
a lot of people will talk about the early work

(14:37):
in nuclear fission, which we will get to, which happened
in a place that precipitated the need for ment projects.
So in California, same time as everything else, you had
a group with ernest O. Lawrence who will be incredibly
important in this conversation, Stanley Livingston and Milton White who

(14:59):
operated the first cyclotron on the Berkeley campus of the
University of California, and Lawrence would end up playing an
instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. Yeah. No, uh. For
everyone is wondering a cyclotron, it is a particle accelerator,
right right. It was this is the era where we
start getting the earliest particle accelerators. The Vandergraf would build

(15:22):
one as well, in a different style. Uh. And Lawrence
was was working on this early and not with the
goal of nuclear fission necessarily. It was part of particle
physics to understand more about the fundamental particles that make
up all the stuff around us. Uh. And it ultimately

(15:42):
would end up being used to help create the material
for nuclear weapons. Um. But at the time no one
had any concept of doing that. Ninety three there were
some early attempts to find a reliable way to split atoms,
but they're largely unsuc sccessful or very inefficient. They require
huge amounts of power. And I'll tell you why. Most

(16:05):
of them used protons fired at an atomic nucleus. So
here's the thing. Protons have a positive charge. Correct. Atomic
nucleus also has a positive charge because it's only made
up of protons and neutrons, So we are positive and positive.
So what happens if you put two ends, like two
northern ends of two different magnets together against each other. Yeah,

(16:27):
they do. It's uh, you know a lot like me
and Josh Clark, we just despite the fact we sit
right next to each other, there's just this repulsion. It's
the other one. It's kind of amazing, like, you know,
like if I start walking towards Josh's chair just rolls
the other way. Now, Josh and I get along just fine.
Obviously he was just recently on the episode tech Stuff,

(16:49):
so um. But yeah, it was really hard to get
a direct hit on a nucleus because of this these
light charges repelling one another. In fact, there were some
estimates that said that it only happened one every one
million tries non efficient way to split at him. So
while people were starting to think there might be a

(17:10):
way of getting some energy from this, like to use
this as a means of generating power or perhaps even
creating a weapon down the line, the efficiency was so
low that it didn't seem like it was going to
be uh a viable exactly, Like it's a good proof
of concept. Yeah, So Albert Einstein, Niels Bore, and Rutherford

(17:35):
all felt that the process would be great for getting
a better understanding of nuclear physics, but would remain impractical
for pretty much anything else. Now, Rutherford actually described the
idea of harnessing nuclear energy as moonshine. That was what
he called it. Einstein His version was saying, it's like
the ability to get a proton to to collide with

(17:58):
the nucleus would be akin to walking into an enormous
room that's pitch black and shooting at a couple of
birds flying around randomly through the right. Yeah, that was
his his comparison. Is no way to make it not
an accident, right and heels Boor said, it's pretty much
a long shot unless we figure out something else. And
then you had another fellow, a Hungarian physicist who was

(18:20):
living in the United States, Leo sciss Lard, and sciss
Lard hypothesized that if you use something else, not protons,
what have you used a beam of neutrons aimed at
an atom because neutrons have no charge, so it doesn't matter,
there's no repulsion there. Yeah, The only thing is that
how do you shoot a non charged particle? Because if

(18:43):
you're using protons, then all you can do all you
have to do is created a positive charge to repel
it or a negative charge to attract it and move
it that way, but a neutral one is a little trickier. Um.
But he thought, if you could do this, and if
the atom was large enough, it had its own neutrons,
sometimes when the atom splits up, it might give off

(19:05):
neutrons too. And if it gives off neutrons with enough
energy and you have enough atoms there, those neutrons could
collide with other atoms, which could cause them to break apart,
and those neutrons could go out and hit other atoms,
and each time you would be multiplying this effect. As
long as you had more than one neutron being given

(19:26):
off and as long as those were colliding with some
other atoms, this trend would continue until you were out
of stuff or the neutrons, or there just weren't enough
atoms for the neutrons to make contact, and you would
get a nuclear chain reaction which you could use to
either power or a city or blow one up. Yes, yes,
at that point they you know, the next question becomes like, well, yes,

(19:49):
at that point, the next question becomes a matter of control,
because you know it's all well and good from an
academic for suspective to say, oh, guys, look at this
neat thing that we think we can do. And then,
you know, for someone to say, okay, well let's let's
try it. Let's get the rubber on the road, and

(20:10):
then what do you think is going to happen? And
they say, well, one or two things. It's either going
to power the city or blow it up, right, but
we're pretty confident it's going to be one of those two.
So the next question is like, how do you make
this useful? Right? And for Leo, I'm gonna call Leo

(20:30):
because I'm just gonna Putcher his last name over otherwise, uh,
the Hungarian physicist. Uh. For Leo, the problem was that
when he was first trying this out, he was using
lighter atoms and he couldn't get these sustained reactions, so
he kind of he kind of thought, well, I guess
that's a bust. It seemed like a good idea, but
it's not working. So so so there it became an

(20:50):
academic question for a while because there was they weren't
He wasn't using the heavier atoms which would have created
a sustainable reaction. They would have been dense enough to
have that impact. Right, they don't decay in the same
way that other other ones might just take on the neutron,
and they wouldn't split apart in other words, So moving
on with four, we get another fellow who becomes very

(21:10):
important in Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist. He
begins to use neutrons to bobard atoms, and he figured
the uncharged particles wouldn't meet that same resistance as protons,
just as Leo had. He was right. He bombarded sixty
three different stable elements with neutrons and created thirty seven
new radioactive atoms. And he also found out that if

(21:33):
he used carbon and hydrogen, he could actually slow the
movement of the neutrons a little bit, and that would
actually increase the chances of a nucleus accepting a new neutron.
So you wanted to fire the neutrons fast, but not
too fast. You had to you had to control that.
Uh So he then bombarded uranium with neutrons. Had created something,

(21:55):
but he had no idea what it was. In fact,
no one was really sure at the time. There was
a lot of disagreement in the scientific community about whatever
Fermi had made, they were like, because it was new,
and because it was new, they didn't know, right. So yeah,
so they were wondering if it was transuranic, as in
a man made element that would not be found in nature,

(22:17):
or if Fermi had somehow managed to split up uranium
so that behave like lighter elements, because some of the
stuff that was left over it seemed really similar to
lighter elements on the elemental table. But how could that be?
It's certainly not magic. Yeah, And it's funny because he
had actually achieved nuclear fission but did not know it.

(22:38):
He didn't he didn't understand it enough to know that
that's what had happened at the time. And that takes
us to eight. And this is the event that really
creates the need for the Manhattan Project because it takes
place in Berlin. Now eight in Berlin, it was already
a very tumultuous time in up right. World War two

(23:01):
had not yet begun, but Germany had started to really
cause huge problems, including uh, cracking down on the Jewish
population already. Uh, and it was you know, the whole
Germany Austrian alliance was was an issue. And then there
were rumblings about Germany possibly invading other countries and then

(23:27):
also spreading to you know, Italy as well. Yes, Italy
was also invading African nations at the time, so this
was really a tumultuous period. So in Berlin, UH, Germany
was a place where there where particle physics, theoretical physics
had really blossomed at the end of the nineteenth century

(23:48):
beginning of the twentieth century, and you had a collection
of scientists who all were just interested in furthering our
understanding of the universe. They just happened to be in
a place where that understanding was going to be uh
tilted toward the ends of the German government. So radiochemists

(24:10):
Auto Han and Fritz Strassman, we're using Ferms method of
bombarding atoms with neutrons, and they found that uranium nuclei,
unlike other nuclei, didn't just absorb the neutrons. They broke
apart into two more or less equal pieces. They became
fragments of uranium and radioactive barrium isotopes, which explained why

(24:32):
some of the substances from firm's experiments resembled lighter elements
because they were they were barium. So that was the
the scientific explanation of what was going on with Fermi
and Firm. He's like, huh, that's interesting. Um. What's also
interesting is that this information because you know, it also
released some energy. Uh. This information was examined by Lease

(24:56):
Mightner and her nephew Otto Frish. Uh. Mightner was a
Jewish exile. She had fled Austria and was living in
Sweden and was working with Han and Strassmann through correspondence
UM and she and Fresh looked at the results of
the experiments and concluded that they released an enormous amount

(25:18):
of energy and that this marked a new type of
process which was explained by the equals MC squared equation.
So again we see a physical proof of a theoretical proposition. Right.
And this also started bringing to light, Hey, maybe we
should really take that Einstein equation thing really seriously. Um.

(25:39):
So Fresh was the one who called the process fission.
That's where we get nuclear fission was from Otto Frish's
description of the of of this. He was taking um
inspiration from biological processes and cell division, so that's where
he came up with fission. And just to just to
interject not too much of the political endscape. But I

(26:00):
do think it's important to note a big thing happened
happened to for me in thirty eight as well. Why
don't you tell me about that? Well, in ninety eight
he left Italy to uh receive his Nobel Prize in physics,
which is, uh, you know, it's a pretty good deal.
It's like when you get that tenth stamp on your

(26:22):
subway card. Oh, I was thinking, like, you finally get
that star on the on the Walk of Fame. Yeah, yeah,
you finally get the star of which I think I
don't remember which subway stamp that is. No, it's it's
like I think you gotta go like at least twelve times. Oh, man,
come on, that's a commitment. Anyway. Well, somehow I'm going
to go out on a limb and say it's because
he was a genius, uh, and the based on his

(26:45):
discoveries for me, leaves Italy to receive the Nobel Prize,
and he never returns because you know, at the time,
as you know to your earlier point, the situation in
Europe is at a slow boil, and especially if you
are Jewish, as for me, is this is uh, this

(27:06):
is a time where you can, like legoists smell a
fell wind. Yeah, there's actually there's a I mean, if
you and I'm sure I know I've talked about this
in a previous episode. I can't remember what the subject was,
but I remember specifically talking about um uh German scientists,
German and Austrian scientists who fled Europe in advance of

(27:31):
the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. UH and
then some who stuck around believing that things would get better,
only to find out that in fact was not the case.
And how despite their brilliance and their contributions to science,
because of their their heritage, they were treated they were
you know, they were pulled away from their work, some

(27:51):
of them, of them were imprisoned. Um. And of course
there's a whole other story we could talk about with
the United States liberating certain scientists to work for them
instead of for the Nazis. That might be, it might
be a little bit. That is definitely a different, too
far different. That's actually more in rocketry than it is

(28:14):
with the Manse. But at any rate, so nine our
buddy Leo, he realizes the work by Han and Strassmann
could be the answer to his failures to produce a
nuclear chain reaction, and that uranium would be heavy enough
and couldmit neutrons at an energy great enough to cause
a split in another atom. So if you had enough uranium,
you could presumably create a nuclear chain reaction that way.

(28:38):
Uh So this is this renews his interest in the
possibility of creating one of these. Um He actually asked
that for me and Frederick Jolie Currie refrain from publishing
their findings. He asks them not to publish them because
since he's made this realization that a nuclear chain reaction

(29:00):
could be possible, his fear is that if they publish
their findings, the Nazis will hear about it, and because
the initial study was done in Berlin, they could end
up putting this on the fast track to developing a
weapons program, which would change the course of the war. Yeah,
which keep in mind, this is when the war officially begins,

(29:22):
right when you know when the World War two start, Well,
people would say that's when Germany invaded Poland, and that's
that happens in the ninety nine. So he asks them
not to publish their findings. Now. Fermi says okay and
holds off, but Curie goes ahead and publishes his work
in April nineteen thirty nine. So it turns out those

(29:42):
concerns were warranted. To Leo turns to the the rock
star of rock stars, because keep in mind, this is
an era when scientists had a certain prestige among the public.
I mean, this is the era of people like Tesla

(30:03):
making headlines and Edison, and meanwhile you've got other scientists
and engineers who are capturing the imagination of hundreds of
thousands of people. He turns to the most influential of
them all, good old Einstein, and Leo says, to al
listen here about Bubby. Uh that equation you made awesome.

(30:25):
Turns out you're right. Problem now we know how to
make a practical application of that. Potentially it's gonna take
some years. But the Germans are already aware of this,
and you know how bad the Germans can be. We're
having this conversation not in Germany. And when I say Germans,

(30:46):
obviously I'm talking about the Nazi Party. I have nothing
against Germans at any rate. So he says, we need
to convince the United States government that we have to
get on this right now, because if we don't, they
will and then that's just gonna be domination for Germany.
And so Einstein, convinced by Leo, decides to write a

(31:10):
letter to President Roosevelt Fdr not not Teddy. So he
writes a letter to Roosevelt and expresses their concerns about
the possibility of a nuclear weapon program starting in Germany
and arguing that, uh, the United States really has to

(31:30):
take that into consideration. Uh. The letter is sent in
August ninety nine, and on September one, ninety nine, Germany
invades Poland. World War two begins officially because that's when
you get other nations in Europe declaring war against Germany.
So Roosevelt has a meeting with his close friend and

(31:51):
unofficial advisor, Alexander Sachs, who's not a politician, he's a
financial advisor type. Saxon Roosevelt sit down and on October eleventh,
ninety nine, they talk about Einstein's letter. On October nineteenth,
Roosevelt writes back to Einstein and says he has formed
a committee made up of representatives from the Army and

(32:13):
the Navy plus Sacks to research uranium. Yeah. The Advisory
Committee on Uranium, headed by Lyman J. Briggs. Yeah, Briggs
would become another important figure in this in this story
that is formed officially on October twenty one, nineteen thirty nine.
So this happens fast, right, They talk about on the eleventh.

(32:35):
On the nineteenth he writes back to Einstein. On the
twenty one, this new committee meets for the first time. Uh. Briggs,
by the way, was the former director of the National
Bureau of Standards. Now you get Feremi and Leo concentrating
on using carbon in the form of graphite to slow
down neutrons in a pile of you two thirty eight,

(32:56):
and by slowing down the neutrons, they hope to increase
the chances of a chain reaction. But they discovered that
that method would really only be suitable for probably generating
power because it would require too large a form factor
to make an effective bomb out of it. The uranium
didn't react at a level fast enough for it to
be an explosive release of power. So for me thought,

(33:19):
the chances of this being useful in a weapon are
pretty slim, but it could be a really useful way
of generating electricity. Now, meanwhile, Uh, if we moved to
nineteen forty physicists were starting to run into a problem.
Uranium two thirty eight was not prone to creating these
nuclear chain reactions. They were, they were having issues with this,

(33:40):
and that's the most common when that's the one that
is of the world's uranium. Right, So here's your stuff,
but it don't work. It would be like imagine that
you you have, you know, a big battery drawer, and
those batteries have just a little juice in them. They're
not enough for you to like, you know, you put
them in your RC car and your car just goes

(34:03):
you know, I hate that. But there still out there. Yeah,
and some of that is uranium two thirty five, but
it's it's usually wrapped up in you two thirty eight.
It's not you know, it's not like you just find
little veins of YouTube five out there. So John Are
Dunning observed that uranium two thirty five appeared to be
a lot more promising, but only if you could separate

(34:24):
it from you two thirty eight. So now they're they're thinking, well,
if there's some way for us to separate these isotopes
from two thirty five from two thirty eight and concentrate
enough to thirty five and one spot, we might be
able to create a nuclear reaction chain reaction that is
sustainable until a significant amount of that fuel is converted

(34:46):
into energy, in which case you would have either a
big boom or a sustained power source. So we're going
for the boom. Yes, so without enriching you, two thirty
five is pretty much impossible to experience. Meant further, they
didn't have a way of doing this like they figure
well to thirty five according to the math is better.
Here's the problem. I don't know how to get the

(35:08):
two thirty five out from the two yet right in
a way that would come across come up with more
than just microscopic amounts of and we're talking about the
need for kims of the stuff. So it's a problem.
It was also in ninety that the Advisory Committee on
Uranium recommended that the government fund research into isotope separation

(35:31):
and nuclear chain reactions, which the committee did. So separating
two from two thirty five was hard. They're chemically identical,
so you can't use chemistry to do it because they're
going to react exactly the same way they're coming. Masses
differ by less than one per cent, so finding a
way of separating them by mass is also a little tricky.

(35:52):
But one of the more promising methods was the electro
magnetic method. Now, this meant that you would create a
magnetic field generated by a mass spectrometer to separate particles,
and essentially you create a magnetic field, and yeah, I
had the particles come into contact with that magnetic field.
The magnetic field would deflect particles. Particles that had greater

(36:14):
mass would be deflected a shorter distance. Yeah, because I
can't push those as far right. So you could do
this and deflect those particles. But it wasn't exactly fast.
In nineteen forty they estimated that to create a gram
of you two thirty five using a mass spectrometer in
this way, if you took you two thirty eight and

(36:37):
two thirty five together and tried to just get one
gram of you two thirty five, it would take you
approximately twenty seven thousand years. Not not like not the
ideal time frame. Not if you wanted to respond to
escalating aggression in Europe, not not so much seven years.
Probably some multiple conflicts would have had happened and resolved

(37:00):
during that time. I mean, I think Hitler, who was
admittedly an ambitious dude was only planning on the ranch
itself to be like a thousand years. Yeah, so it
would have been a pretty it would have been a
pretty long long bet on the boy. We would have
been embarrassingly late to the party. Yes, So there were
other ones too that they were looking into. One of
them was Gassiest diffusion, which I have suffered from myself

(37:21):
an occasion to say thank you. Gassiest diffusion was that's
where you would use a porous barrier and you would
use gas that has you two thirty eight and YouTube
thirty five atoms in it to pass through this porous barrier. Now,
the Youto thirty five, being of less mass, would pass
more readily through the barrier. So you would do this

(37:44):
once and then the mixture you would have would have
a higher concentration of You two thirty five than the
previous one did because fewer of the Youto thirty eight
would have gone through. But then you have to repeat
the process, and you repeat the process over and over
and over again. It's kind of like passing a solution
through a filter, and each pass the filter catches more

(38:05):
and more of the stuff you don't want and allows
the stuff you do want to go through, but it's
not fool proof. That's why you have to keep on
doing it the process, so again not terribly efficient. John
Dunning focused on that particular method. Then you also had
the possibility of using centrifuges and a centrifuge, you know
it essentially it spins a round and a round and
around us a centrifugal force or tripital force if you prefer,

(38:28):
but centrifical force to to separate out materials. The heavier
materials sink to one end, the lighter materials are pushed
to the top. So in this case you two thirty
five would be kind of at the top and center
of the centrifuge, and the U two three it would
be would it sinkle down lower and you would skim
it off the top. Centrifuges however, at the time not

(38:50):
terribly reliable. That was headed off by a guy named
Jesse W. Beams at the University of Virginia. We're gonna
get into the politics, and there's a guy I have
a feeling that he's come up and stuff they don't
want you to know. Maybe once or twice have you
guys ever talked about Vanavar Bush. We have talked about
Vanavar Bush. He is a He was an American engineer

(39:14):
and inventor. He headed the U S Office of Scientific
Research and Development. Uh and he was one of the
early uh now, well, okay, he was the go to
guy from military R and D at the time in
the US. He was also kind of like the liaison
between the politicians and the scientists. That's a great way

(39:36):
to put it, because he had the analytical scientific mind.
He had the chops that would be required for a scientist.
Again like rock Star to respect you. He's incredibly ambitious
as well as effective at maneuvering through different power structures.
Like this guy was like he could get stuff done

(39:58):
and no offense to the a various stereotypes of scientists.
But he probably was better at playing the game of diplomacy. Yeah, yeah,
because he was he knew he understood how that particular
science worked. So he was the president of the Carnegie

(40:18):
Foundation and then was appointed the head of the National
Defense Research Committee, which was a voice within the executive
branch of government. And under that the Uranium Committee was reorganized.
So the Uranium Committee gets uh kind of a new version,
a new yeah kind of mission statement. Um and and

(40:42):
also meant that it was no longer organized under the
military department, so it didn't have to Yeah, I meant
they could get their funding outside of the military. So
instead of the Army or the Navy deciding all right,
we're going to allocate this much of our budget towards
uranium research, it was an independent organization underneath this new

(41:03):
committee um So Bush allocated funds to continuing research in
nuclear power and weapons. But he made some decisions that
ended up um really shaping the direction that the Manhattan
Project would move in. The first decision he made was
that no one on the committee would be allowed to
be foreign born. No foreign born scientists would be allowed

(41:26):
on the committee. That ment Einstein was not part of
this part. He also barred the publication of scientific findings
on uranium research for an indetermined amount of time because again,
like like the the Leo's previous concerns, he didn't want
this any other discoveries to make their way across into

(41:48):
enemy hands. So now we're getting up to nineteen forty one,
World War two is in full swing in Europe. Uh
Glen T. S Borg, another important person identifies element ninety
four a trans uranium or man made element that was
produced from radioactive decay of an isotope of neptunium. Neptunium

(42:08):
is also a trans uranium element, that's ninety three, so
ninety four he gets to name it. I call it plutonium. Yeah,
And he discovers that one of the features of plutonium
is that's one point seven times more likely to undergo
fission as uranium two thirty five. It loves fission, yeah,
to thirty five, loves fission more than two thirty eight.

(42:31):
Plutonium loves fission more than uranium two thirty five. So
the experiments took place at Ernest Lawrence's radiation laboratory at Berkeley.
So Lawrence again very important here. Lawrence personally felt that
the uranium Committee was a little slow, that it was
not responding fast enough, it wasn't funding the research. Uh,
And so he met with Vanavar Bush and then Bush

(42:54):
saw Lawrence as being really persuasive and and influential, So
he makes Lawrence an adviser to Briggs. You know, Briggs
was the head of that uranium committee. And so once
that happens, suddenly the coffers opened up a little bit
more and more research gets funded. Uh. Vanavar Bush also

(43:16):
created a committee to report on the Uranian program in
the US, and he put Arthur Compton, who was a
physicist who specialized in radiation studies, in charge of it.
So Compton makes a report in May nineteen forty one
and confirmed that either you two thirty five or plutonium
were the most likely candidates for some sort of atomic weapon. Yes. Uh.

(43:36):
And on June forty one, the United States establishes the
Office of Scientific Research and Development. This is the one
you referred to as Bush being of the head of it.
This is when it was officially made a thing was
officially Yeah, we we had talked to I think and
stuff that I want you to know about about that time,
just a few days before this is actually was a
few days after the twenty two when Germany invaded the

(43:59):
Soviet un. Yes. So various things are hitting various fans right,
the big one being that there is a lot of
incentive to push this research through. Uh. Meanwhile, James B. Conant,
who was president of Harvard, became the new head of
the National Defense Research Committee, which was now an advisory

(44:20):
board that would offer guidance on research and development funding
and guys, we know how didn't I not to interject
too much, becauys, we know how confusing it can be
to hear these very long, dry names of committees. But
part of this, part of all this restructuring, to hear
about and all these names, comes because they were desperately

(44:43):
trying to find the best way to approach this problem. Uh,
simply because can you imagine. Of course, there were, of
course there were agents from what would become the Allies
in Germany at the time time. However, the level of
access they had was no guarantee. The only way to

(45:06):
be there was, the only way to know that you
would not be the victim of a nuclear bomb or
an atomic weapon was to be first passed the post.
So this stuff is I mean, Jonathan, there were probably
some egos involved. Oh no, there are tons of ego.
But I think I think the I think the main
thing to remember is that although we hear all these

(45:28):
dry names, what they're really doing is desperately and it
dues that were correctly desperately trying to find the way
to get massive amounts of funding because they already know
it's going to be an expensive surchace. Well that and
and at this stage in we're still talking theory, we're
still we're still saying that they're saying, if such a

(45:51):
thing as possible, you too, and plutonium are our best bets.
That's a great point. We can't guarantee it's possible. If yeah,
And that's the thing is that you gut that's why
you have all this research and development going in And
they're going through multiple lines of inquiry, right because they
don't want to say, well, let's just look at one
and hope that that is going to work out. There's

(46:11):
no let's look at all of them and find out
which ones are the most promising and concentrate on those.
So uh so Coma is head of this board that's
going to look at these different um proposals and decide
which ones are the ones most the most warrant additional funding.
So if you are the head of a research department

(46:33):
it's a Columbia university, you're more likely to receive funding
than if you're some Yahoo in your backyard saying if
I smack these two rocks together, sparks fly. So that's
the important part that this is all about. Like the
goal here is pushing forward this research so under this
new organization, the Uranium Committee becomes the Office of Scientific

(46:54):
Research and Development Section on Uranium. And that's a really
long name, and they iognized it, so they code named
it S one. So as one becomes this specific committee
that's looking at uranium research, can it be used as
a way of making a weapon? July one, a group
in Britain's National Defense Research Committee, which was codenamed MAUD

(47:19):
in a U d uh. They they their whole purpose
was again to look and see if a nuclear weapon
could be practical. They submitted a report that, based upon
their calculations, you could use ten ms of you two
thirty five to create an enormously destructive bomb and that
could be dropped by existing aircraft of the time, and

(47:43):
it would probably be two years out in development, like
within two years of concentrate development, such a bomb could
be built. So by ninety three Britain shares this report
with America, and because Britain recognizes that America has an
enormous resource in scientific expertise, so that report specifically recommended

(48:06):
using gaseous diffusion to separate you two thirty five from
you two thirty eight and outright dismisses the idea of
using plutonium. So the Brits say, you should use two
thirty five, You should use gaseous diffusion to get your
two thirty five from two thirty eight, and forget about plutonium.
It's a dead end. That was their recommendation. So meanwhile

(48:29):
you got fair Me who becomes the head of theoretical
studies at the Uranium Committee. And keep in mind fair
Me is the plutonium guy. Yeah. So there when you
say there are probably egos involved, yes there were, and
there were people who were absolutely convinced that their approach
was the one that was going to be the most economical,

(48:51):
the most efficient, the most scientifically sound. So in these arguments,
do you think there are a lot of those you
fools moments? Just you fuse all be uh in dramatic
like nineteen thirties style dialects, Well, not nineteen forty one.
In October, Bush meets with Roosevelt to discuss the state

(49:14):
of research. He receives instruction from Roosevelt to continue research
and development, but it was expressly told don't build a
bomb until I tell you to, which was fine because
they were at least a few years away from being
able to build one in the first place, even under
ideal situation. November sixty one, Arthur Compton reports that, based

(49:37):
on his calculations, a critical mass of YouTube you two
thirty five between two and one rams would produce a
powerful fission bomb uh and could be created with an
investment of around fifty million to a hundred million dollars
in isotopes separation technologies, which turned out to be crazy optimistic. Yeah,

(50:00):
so uh. Obviously the Brits come up with ten kilograms,
and Arthur Compton says it's probably gonna be somewhere between
two and a hundred. It's a slightly larger range. H
December seven, ninety one very important day in World War two.
That was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's when the
Japanese attack Pearl Harbor that brings the United States into
World War Two and sets this all on an even

(50:22):
faster track than it was before. So January nineteenth, nineteen
forty two, Roosevelt gives Vanavar Bush to go ahead to
pursue the development of an atomic bomb. So we've gone
from keep on researching this to see if it's possible
to build one of these, keeping in mind that we're
still working in the realm of theory. Yeah, and the

(50:44):
but the funding flight gates were open. They said, no
more um figuring out how to do it now, that
just becomes a step in my mandate to you to
give me a working atomic bomb. And they form what
is called the Top Policy Committee, which was led by

(51:05):
Vanavar Bush. They also had a vice president, Henry A. Wallace.
James Knitt was part of it. Henry L. Stimpson, who
was the Secretary of War, was part of it, and
General George C. Marshall, who was Chief of Staff of
the Army, was part of it. And the Top Policy
Group decided to pursue five strategies, four different isotope isolation
methods and the use of plutonium as the five different

(51:30):
methods of potentially creating an atomic bomb. The reason they
decided to look at five again was because none of
the five had so far emerged as the clear superior method.
So because they didn't know, they said, well, we would
rather go ahead and have all these different groups, all
of which have brilliant engineers and physicists attached to them,

(51:52):
to independently work on this stuff. They're motivated by one
many of them come from Europe, and they see what's
going on in World War two too. Many of them
have egos, and they want to prove that their method
is the right one and three they're they're genuinely interested
in the science. So March of nineteen forty two, UH, Lawrence,

(52:14):
the fellow who ran the cyclotron and Berkeley, pursues the
electromagnetic isotope separation method using a cyclotron as a mass spectrometer,
and he's so successful that vanavar Bush sends another message
to Roosevelt saying, Hey, if this pans out, we might
be able to have an atomic bomb as early as
nineteen forty four. That would turn out to be optimistic. Uh.

(52:36):
In April nineteen forty two, Arthur Compton, who was guiding
research into plutonium. So we got Lawrence with electromagnetic isotope isolation.
Now we've got Compton who's looking into plutonium. He's funding
the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley, who may
be familiar to some of you, especially if you've ever
checked out Yeah, up and high, here comes up a lot.

(53:00):
I mean, every single person that I'm mentioning here could
warrant an entire episode and stuff you missed in history class.
I'm sure has covered many of them in the past.
So Oppenheimer and Fermi also gets funding from Arthur Compton.
He says, all right for me, he's got a pile,
a nuclear pile that he's working with at Columbia University.

(53:21):
Also funds Eugene Wigners theoretical work at Princeton. Now over
at the University of Chicago, Compton secured some space to
create his own uranium and graphite nuclear pile. By securing
some space, I mean he converted a racketball court underneath
the grandstand at stag Field at the University of Chicago

(53:46):
into a nuclear pile. This, by the way, would scare
the heck out of everybody later on, because he didn't
bother to tell anyone that that's what he was doing. Well, well, well,
let us remember this was a top secret project. And
also if we're talking, I don't know why my voice
was And also if we're if we're talking about public safety,

(54:06):
then you know, the dangerous rationalization people can always make
is what is the safety of the people above in
a grandstand or even the University of Chicago compared to
the safety of the world what I'm telling you that
he was a maverick. Well, I tell you know, uh
he uh. Well, in his defense, this approach that he

(54:26):
was using, which was very similar to Faremi's approach, was
low energy. It was not something that was perceived to
have risk of it becoming a runaway reaction. It was
it was more again to study the actual physics involved
to better understand it, and posed very little threat to

(54:47):
the people of Chicago. Using the design that he used,
he wasn't using it. He was using a design that
didn't require a cooling system or a shield because he
was it wasn't this super high energy type of of
reactions that he was he was looking into. May two, Compton,
Arthur Compton asks j. Robert Oppenheimer to take over research

(55:10):
into fast neutron interactions to determine the necessary conditions for
a critical mass to explode. So Oppenheimer takes on that work.
Then of our Bush asks James Conant, the guy from Harvard,
for recommendations on how to proceed, and the S one
Leadership Committee decides that instead of focusing on one area
of research, all of them still have to be funded

(55:32):
and accelerated. They still weren't certain which of these were
going to end up being successful is still too early,
So they say, well, we can't, We can't pull the
trigger on one of these. Yet we still have to
keep on going. And in June two, the Army's involvement
in the project, uh really picks up. You have a
guy named Colonel James C. Marshall come into the picture.

(55:53):
So James C. Marshall, he's in charge of the Army
Corps of Engineers involvement in this project, and the Army
Corps of Engineers their main job was to secure sites
that they could then use to build facilities on to
test out the theory that was being generated in these
various camps. So in your normal operations, if there's not

(56:18):
a war going on, what you would typically do is
you have the research and development work that is starting
to be promising. You would build a pilot plant that
would test these things out, and it would be designed
in such a way that you can make rapid changes
to the plants design in order to best fit whatever
the process. Yeah, exactly. So you might say, oh, it

(56:41):
turns out that this design we came up with isn't
the best one. We should change it to this a
pilot plant is the kind where you would be able
to do that. Then once you figured out what was
the best approach, you could build a full production facility, right. Yeah,
And at at this time I believe the US Army
Corps of Engineers was based in New York. Yeah, the headquarters,

(57:04):
it was supposed to be a temporary headquarters, was on
Broadway in Manhattan. Because you want to keep it. Yeah,
So they called it the Manhattan Engineering District, or sometimes
just the Manhattan District and sometimes just Manhattan. And that,
in fact, is where the Manhattan Project gets its name.
It gets his name from James C. Marshall's headquarters in Manhattan.

(57:27):
And he was really he was on the phone calling
up potential land, you know, landowners who could potentially sell
him the land necessary from the build these facilities. And
the crazy thing here is the Army Corps of Engineers
and and these scientists are essentially skipping the pilot stage.
They're going straight from well, we're pretty sure this is
the way it's gonna work, to let's build this facility

(57:48):
to do it. And by skipping the pilot stage it
causes huge headaches down the line. But at the same
time they said well, we don't have the luxury of
time to go the scientifically responsible routes, so we have
to do it this way. So, uh we get the
Manhattan Project. Technically, the project has a different name. The

(58:09):
the official code name for the project, because it's super secret, y'all,
is the development of Substitute Metals or sometimes the development
of Substitute materials depending upon which citation you're reading, or
d s M. That's the official code name, but everyone
calls it the Manhattan Project. Uh So we are now
at the point where the Manhattan Project comes into being,

(58:31):
James C. Marshall being in charge of it, kind of
being an administrator to make sure that the scientists are
getting the resources they need. And this leads us to
the conclusion of this episode so that in our next
episode we can focus specifically on what happens with the
Manhattan Project. You're going to have a whole list of
new names. This is really just to prepare you in

(58:53):
case you ever decide to read the Game of Thrones series,
so that way you know how to handle all these
different characters, because it's kind of similar in that respect.
Um So, Ben, we're gonna be talking about like super
top secret stuff in the next episode. Keeping in mind,
the Manhattan Project was a secret from almost everybody from

(59:16):
two when it came into existence to mid nineteen after
the bomb has dropped on Hiroshima. So this is the
when it comes to stuff they don't want you to know.
This is it. You talk about massive government conspiracy. It
doesn't get much bigger than this. We're talking a hundred

(59:38):
thirty thousand people or thereabouts employed in somewhere or another,
most of whom had no idea what they were contributing to. Right, Yeah,
this is uh, this is bigger than you know. This
is something that we talked about our previous one podcast.
I'm I'm excited. Yeah, so let's see. I guess this
will be a little bit of a cliffhanger for the listeners.

(01:00:01):
So you guys will have to tune in next week,
same bad time, same bad channel. U Ben. If they
want to find you, where can they look? Where does
your stuff live? Oh? Yeah you can. You can find
us on YouTube your podcast streaming place of choice. Uh.
My co host producer Matt and uh Nolan I do

(01:00:22):
do the show stuff they don't want you to know. Uh,
We're all over the place. We have a website, but
it's really long stuff they don't want you to know
dot com. We didn't choose the name, but check us out.
You can also find Jonathan and I on brain Stuff.
You can find us on what this Stuff. You can
find us cameoing and various different things. Usually we're in

(01:00:43):
the background of someone else's someone who's who's better at
us than what we do. What are you talking about, like,
after this talk about egos, Technically we are the best
in this in this entire office. I mean, I don't
like to brag, but Ben and I are clearly the
most camera ready of every here. So for me, it's
just letting go and not not being uh, not being good. Said,

(01:01:06):
I like to rub a little garbage on myself just beforehand,
just to kind of bring you down a little bit. Yeah,
it's nice to at least fake humility and humility with Alright,
So guys, you can check out this stuff stuff they
don't want you to know. Remember, if you want to
send me a message, you have a suggestion for a
future topic, or a guest or someone you want me
to interview, anything like that, send it to tech stuff

(01:01:27):
at how stuff works dot com or drop me a
line on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler. The handle at all
three is tech Stuff hs W, and we will conclude
this discussion on the Manhattan Project. Really send for more
on this and basands of other topics works dot com